Beneath The Skin(162)

I take another long swig from my beer, then stare at the phone intently, desperate for a response.

Dmitri taps my arm and I ignore him. He tries to get his hands in my face, signing: You want to take a turn? I need a break. But the last thing I feel like doing is playing more Xbox against Brant; he’s a fucking prodigy at gaming and no one ever stands a chance.

Sunday was such a mess. Monday was no better. I knew I shouldn’t have let a girl do this to me. How many times did I warn myself?

That’s my best and worst quality: I never learn.

But Brant and Dmitri kept pushing me at her, as if they know what’s best for me. If they knew anything at all, they’d mind their own fucking business and let me suffer in peace.

I decide to text her again. I’ll text her until I get a damn response.

Over the course of the next hour, Brant goes off to bowl, which I learn through a few rushed signs from Dmitri after he gives up playing Xbox and tells me he has a short story due tomorrow that he needs to finish, then closes himself off in his room to jerk off; even without ears, I know what the fuck he’s really doing in there.

Or maybe I don’t know anything. Maybe I made a huge mistake by blowing Dessie off.

But when I woke up Sunday, reality had sat on my chest and made me its bitch. It wasn’t just the mild sting of a hangover; it was the feeling like I’d just woken up from an amazing dream that I couldn’t climb back into. I felt frustrated, lost, and obsessed.

I still feel frustrated, lost, and obsessed.

Suddenly I’m seventeen again and being laughed at by Lacy Torrington in the cafeteria when I tried to ask her to the homecoming dance. The dude she went with, some wrestling captain dickhead named Jerry, confronted me in the hall after fifth period. I couldn’t understand what he was saying, but judging from the laughing faces that surrounded me in the hallway, he wasn’t complimenting my shoes. The confrontation ended with a coach pulling me off of Jerry’s bloodied, sputtering face. The hall wasn’t laughing anymore.

The interpreter in the principal’s office gave me all of Principal Harris’s words in a bunch of hand-shapes and finger wiggles that my parents were hearing. He tells my parents that I have an anger problem and they should consider routine counseling for me. I watch as the interpreter gives me my parents’ reply, my mom groaning about how the fuck they’re going to pay for something like that, and my dad pointing a finger at the principal, asking him what the hell he plans to do about Jerry and the other assholes who pick on his disabled son for being hard of hearing.

No matter how many times I tell my dad that “hard of hearing” isn’t the correct term and that I am, in fact, completely fucking deaf, he never learns.

But maybe that’s where I get it from. I never learn. My dad’s fucked enough random women during his marriage to give me seven hundred siblings. Every time he’d get caught in public going somewhere weird or playing peeping-tom at the pool or doing fuck-knows out in the city until three in the morning, he’d come home and give my mom the same remorseful rhetoric he’d given her since I was ten, and I’d be standing in my little Spiderman PJs in the hallway when they thought I was asleep, hearing every damn word.

He never learns. I never learn.

The next week, I was snuck up on by some idiot I didn’t even know during gym class who thought he’d make a joke out of me. I made a funnier one out of him when I slammed his face into the locker.

I clench shut my eyes, remembering the dazed, glassy look in his eyes when metal met skull.

I was not a monster. I felt remorse. I felt the pain of every fucker I beat up. I felt their pain because I could feel a little bit of my own leaving me with every swing, kick, and bloody nose. Still, no matter how many dumb kids I beat up, no matter if it was them provoking me or vice versa, the pain never went away.

Why is he so angry? This was the lovely question the principal had for my mom and dad. We need to get to the bottom of this. Clayton’s been suspended twice. I really don’t want to expel him.

The interpreter, some twenty-something college babe, looked sadder and sadder each time we had one of these meetings. She shifted so much in her seat. I would stare at her moving hands, watching her sharp green eyes, watching her cross and uncross those long, slender legs of hers.

Do you have anything to say for yourself? I watch the interpreter’s smooth fingers, signing for the principal.

In response, I signed to her: Want to fuck in the supply closet after this shit is over?

She swallowed hard, slowly faced Principal Harris, then said: “He says he’s very sorry.”

An hour later, I showed the interpreter just how sorry I was by ramming her against a rack of shrink-wrapped sponges, scouring rags, and mop-heads, my jeans at my ankles and her skirt hiked halfway up her shuddering, porcelain back.